Design Ideas

These homeowners had seven acres on which to grow things. But when four adjacent acres came onto the real estate market, the husband snapped them up. “He had two compelling motivations,” says Charles Hilton of Hilton-VanderHorn Architects in Greenwich. “He wanted more room to expand the garden, and he wanted to make sure that no monster spec houses were built there. The zoning allows for two-acre lots, so it was likely that there would soon be two McMansions in clear view.”

As a little girl growing up on Nantucket, Karin Sheppard loved visiting her mother at her job as a seamstress at Nantucket Looms. “I’d watch the women sitting at the looms weaving these beautiful things with their hands,” she recalls. “It seemed magical to me.” 

After graduating from college in the early 1980s, Sheppard planned to become a teacher, but when a position in education didn’t materialize, she took a job as a weaver at Nantucket Looms and stayed on for twenty years.

Level Best
A three-tiered, terraced plan defined by granite walls and a grove of birch trees integrates the house with the vegeable garden and shed at the opposite end of the long, narrow front yard, while respecting the wetlands and native woodlands that abut the property. 

If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” The quotation comes from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 book, The Secret Garden, a tale that captivated a Connecticut homeowner when she was a child. Those words still hold so much resonance for the homeowner—now grown and with young grandchildren—that when she and her husband were seeking ideas for the two acres surrounding their house on Wilson’s Point in Norwalk, they turned to this story and other children’s literary classics for inspiration.

Nature may not be composed strictly of flat planes, straight lines and perfect circles, but you can’t find fault its own unique innate geometry. There is beauty in its unevenness, its resistance to clearly defined forms.